I have played with various distributions of Linux for the past 5 years. I would dabble in Red Hat running a web server, install Mandriva (Mandrake at the time) in a dual boot with XP, and actually build a kiosk for a tech school in my area using Suse Linux. I have also ran various versions on Virtual Machines over Windows many times. I have always had a love / hate relationship with Linux. When I could get things working it was great! However, when I just needed something like my SoundCard to work, I would find that 2 hours of compiling a driver just wasn’t worth it.
We’ve covered how to access the Windows Vista Calendar using the keyboard, but what if you wanted to assign a single keystroke to pop up the calendar? Yeah, sure, you can just click it with the mouse, but where’s the geek fun in that?
My new friend Sue asked me the other day how to customize icons on Windows XP, so I thought I’d write up all the ways to change the icons, both by using the built-in methods and also with additional software.
One of the few things about Vista that just drives me crazy is the problems with Windows Explorer. I prefer to use Details mode for certain folders, but it seems like Vista constantly “decides” that the folder should show a different set of columns than what I had previously chosen.
If you’ve opted into one of the Google Experimental Search programs like the keyboard shortcuts experiment, you’ve probably seen the annoying survey box that doesn’t seem to go away, even after you take the survey. Good thing Firefox is customizable, so we can easily remove it with a Stylish script.
If you are like me, you probably have dozens of windows open at any given point, so if you want to tile just a couple of windows you have to minimize everything and then show two of the windows, and then tile them… so how do we just quickly select two taskbar buttons together?
Have you ever wondered about the best way to find interesting how-to videos? (Yeah, I haven’t either) Like most people, I would have just searched Youtube or Google, but there’s a much quicker way to find all the how-to videos you could ever imagine…
I found a cool site today while cruising around the Internet. Stage.FM is a great site to find new unsigned artists and bands. This site is a social network for independent, unsigned musicians and fans. There are several genres of music to choose from, and a lot of it is available for free download or a nominal fee (20 cents).
Have you ever tried going through all of the menus required to delete the Recent Items in the XP Start Menu? It takes forever, especially when you want to hide whatever you shouldn’t have been doing. As usual, there’s a simpler way to do it.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
One of the features in Vista Ultimate is Complete PC Backup and Restore. This allows for easier system backup of your hard disk, essentially making a clone or image of the current state of the hard drive. This feature is available in Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.
If you’ve used Windows for any length of time, you’ve likely tried to open a file with an unknown extension. Instead of getting a list of programs to open the file with, you get an annoying dialog asking you to use a web service to find a program. So how do we change this?
A friend of mine sent me a link to this site from albinoblacksheep.com. This is a flashed based spoof on Windows XP. You can play around with it and get some pretty hilarious messages. I thought the one on the image below about Quicktime was pretty funny. Who knows … this one might be old news to some of you, but for those who have not seen this … it’s worth wasting time on for a good laugh.
Today I ran into a new version of CC Cleaner v 2.06 which includes the Yahoo Toolbar with the installation. According to the instructions this allows you to use CC Cleaner from your browsers toolbar. It seems there are a lot of companies trying to sneak their software into various popular freeware applications lately. I covered one of them in a previous post.
So you try to middle click on a link on a page and miss the link… then the round “Auto Scroll” icon shows up and suddenly the page is moving around and scrolling all by itself. It drives me crazy, so when it was mentioned in the latest Coding Horror article I figured I would write it up in case anybody else wants to disable it.
Last week I wrote about the hassles I experienced with installing Internet Explorer 8 on my XP machine at work. Overall I have not had too many problems with it … mainly because my default browser is Firefox! However I did run into an annoyance with this beta I would like to point out.
I am starting off a series of articles today to show you how to get the extra functionality of Windows Vista Ultimate without spending the outrageous cost of $399. In fact we are not going to spend one cent more in currency, the only thing we will have to spend is some time. Hopefully through this series you will be able to spend as little of your own time as necessary by using my easy to follow tutorials.
If you are a frequent reader of this site, you’ve seen your share of registry hacks. Today I’m going to detail how you can easily find the registry keys we mention, and even create a shortcut or hotkey to immediately drill down to the correct key by copying it to the clipboard.
Are you sick and tired of Windows trying to save you from yourself by asking you far too many times “Are You Sure You Want To Do That?” I think this is one of the more prominent annoyances of any Windows operating system. Thankfully, there is a small utility out there which allows the dialog boxes to be automatically closed. I have been using this program for several years and thought I should write about it in case you are unfamiliar.
One of the reasons that I love Firefox is the dozens of extensions that I have installed to customize the browser, but it seems like every extension includes another icon or widget, and by this point the status bar looks like an instrument panel… so how can I make them hide until I need them?
Miro is a wonderful open source video player. Miro is the new name for the same project entitled Democracy Player. The last version of Democracy Player was 0.9.6 – Now with a new name, logo, and interface Miro is definitely ready for prime time. Miro is available on Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms.
Have you ever wondered how to change the default Windows XP logon screen? Today I got the crazy idea to figure out how to make it look like Windows Vista instead, so I’m writing that up for you.
ClamWin is a very cool lightweight open source anti-virus program. This may not be the best anti-virus solution for beginners, but experienced PC power users should check this out. The download size of this application is around 15 MB. I really like that this application is so light weight and uses little system resources. One downside (if you can call it one) is this development does not yet support real time scanning. You can schedule automatic updates and scans though. ClamWin also creates nifty reports on your updates and scans. You can use it to scan individual files and it also integrates seamlessly with Outlook.
Here is a quick and handy tip to add a toolbar to any directory in Windows on the taskbar.
Windows Vista restricts network traffic to 10 packets per millisecond while playing multimedia to prevent skipping. Unfortunately this causes network speed to be pitiful on a gigabit network, especially during file copies over the network.
